SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2021

If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team! When you get that thing where you’re a rational person and you think it will be great and 99 out of 100 people think it’s bad, that’s when you have opportunity. I was a software developer, a product person. Get tickets here.

Sales Hiring 337

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Headcount 337

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 13, 2019

As the head of our Support Ops team, I work daily with my teammates to develop automated solutions that don’t frustrate customers, but empower them. They can also route customer conversations to the team best equipped to handle their questions and can even provide answers to simple customer questions like, “How can I add more users?”.

Underperforming Technical Team 279

Underperforming Technical Team Customer Support AI Headcount 279

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

MARCH 23, 2020

Companies which don’t use mental models risk unleashing mayhem with poor choices or becoming bloated and bureaucratic by reducing the volume and speed at which decisions are made - both scenarios are undesirable and will impact growth. OKRs are a useful mental model - they make it crystal clear what people and teams should be striving for.

Underperforming Technical Team 213

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service 213

Intercom, Inc.

NOVEMBER 3, 2022

Scaling a support team is challenging enough as it is. You’re investing resources in hiring and training the right people, tracking different metrics at different stages, adding more and more complexity with each increase in headcount, use cases, and customers. For Natasha, the answer is a resounding yes.

Scale 206

Scale Outsourcing Services Software Sales Hiring 206

SaaStr

DECEMBER 1, 2023

We’re still learning what world we’re in — some people interview over Zoom, some are focused on how to build teams in the current age, and many are dealing with a weird overhang from the SaaS explosion of 2021, quiet quitting, layoffs, and team turnover. The last thing a VP of Sales wants to do is start without a team.

Sales Hiring 152

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales Interviewing 152

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 18, 2022

And yet, downplaying your team’s needs undermines CS’s current impact and future revenue-driving potential. According to our 2022 Customer Success Leadership Study, CS teams are already underfunded and under-resourced. This is something that I’m doing with fractional headcount allocation. Now we have a name for this.

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Sales Hiring Headcount Scale 98

Chart Mogul

JULY 15, 2021

As teams grow, it gets harder to rally around key goals. We both noticed a similar pattern: alignment on key metrics breaks as headcount grows: More teams means more silos in processes and tools used to follow metrics. As you grow, complexity will increase and new departments, teams, initiatives will require focus on new goals.

Underperforming Technical Team 52

Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Scale Communication 52

Chart Mogul

JULY 15, 2021

As teams grow, it gets harder to rally around key goals. We both noticed a similar pattern: alignment on key metrics breaks as headcount grows: More teams means more silos in processes and tools used to follow metrics. As you grow, complexity will increase and new departments, teams, initiatives will require focus on new goals.

Underperforming Technical Team 52

Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Scale Communication 52

OPEXEngine

MARCH 9, 2022

How can Finance and Engineering management work together to diagnose weak areas, and shift R&D resources to produce better outcomes for the company? For over a decade, we have been benchmarking R&D expenses and headcounts. Work with engineering teams to understand how and where they’re getting faster or slowing down.

Software Review 59

Software Review Development Team Review Technical Review Outsourced Development 59

Sales Hacker

MAY 21, 2020

There isn’t a continual feedback loop between teams. They may or may not have developed a follow-up schedule but are not continually testing. A Sales & Marketing SLA (service-level agreement) is a formal agreement that defines clear, agreed-upon expectations that align both teams under a unified goal. Decrease Speed-to-Lead.

Scale 132

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Technology 132

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 28, 2022

Sanj has plenty of experience scaling sales teams at growing businesses, and that’s precisely why, as of November of last year, he‘s overseeing EMEA sales at Intercom. In today’s episode, we sat down with Sanj to talk about scaling sales teams, what makes a great salesperson, and strategies to deliver the best outcomes for your customers.

Scale 210

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 210

Chart Mogul

MAY 7, 2020

Onboarding a new member of your sales team is challenging on its own, but especially so when they have to call prospects out of the blue. Providing the right cold calling training can make or break the success of a new team member. Explain their existing sales process and what they learned in the course of developing it.

Sales Hiring 121

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketplace as a Service Headcount 121

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 29, 2021

And so, Mark Rudden and his team had to figure it all out by themselves. Fortunately, Mark had quite a bit of experience working and scaling teams in demanding, hypergrowth environments. Building a great sales team: How Intercom fosters and maintains its sales culture. Onboarding, but make it remote. Kieron: Interesting.

Sales Hiring 223

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 223

Sales Hacker

MAY 19, 2021

This helps us with our prospecting strategies but it also helps our reps develop their skill set and become stronger in their role. When a customer says that now is bad timing, I know that my rep didn’t understand the customer’s pain enough to drive value and offer a solution to their current problems. This is actually gold for us.

Data 80

Data Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Sales Funnel 80

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 2, 2023

Pipeline analytics: Offers sales managers a view of their teams’ pipelines that goes beyond what’s available in their native SFA applications. I am super unimpressed with the current Go-to-market tech stack options…If I found the right team to start a company to take out all of them I would. A couple of big challenges & trends.

AI 78

AI Revenue Scale ChatGPT 78

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 12, 2022

Take Stack Overflow , the world’s largest software developer network, community, and platform, serving close to 100 million monthly visitors. In fact, the team intentionally takes a non-dualistic approach that relies more on empathy, flexibility, and context than on the concept of right versus wrong. .

Leadership 76

Leadership SMB Underperforming Technical Team Scale 76

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 11, 2019

But as the business becomes more successful – and there are resources to build a support team – additional layers begin to separate executives from their customers. Since 2010, he’s helped the company grow to more than 40,000 customers and helped scale the support team to more than 500 employees to assist those users. Short on time?

Scale 188

Scale Scaling Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 188

OpenView Labs

MAY 20, 2021

The same was true when I ran the People function at a software development consultancy that doubled its headcount to ~100 while reducing attrition from 40% to 5% voluntary in 18 months. The question becomes: “Who do I want on my team—and why?”. A final comment on purpose: It should come from your team.

Scale 84

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Software Review 84

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 21, 2018

Whether you’re at an early-stage startup that’s just made its first sales hires, or part of a fast-moving sales team in a large organization, the key to success often comes down to efficiency. That means your focus should be on building the right customer profile and developing precise messaging to reach them. Short on time?

Sales Hiring 183

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 183

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 27, 2019

Sales leaders have a bad habit of dumping people into a new job without properly preparing them to succeed. Although I went through two weeks of training with my team, they were underwater too. I’m going to share my top 20 sales onboarding secrets to help your team beat their 30-60-90 day plan. So tune in….

Sales Hiring 74

Sales Hiring Onboarding Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 74

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting 106

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 106

Sales Hacker

MARCH 12, 2020

If you’re in a position to fill a sales role, you’re likely already feeling the pressure, because your revenue targets are built on the assumption that your team is fully staffed. These factors can quickly derail a sales team. Some roles don’t work if you have a bad hire. Implement career development and specialized training.

Sales Hiring 76

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Compensation Underperforming Technical Team 76

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 19, 2020

It’s your secret to finding the diamonds in the rough when you need more qualified leads, without increasing headcount. SaaS companies, who often have complex sales cycles coupled with small but agile sales teams, can especially benefit from lead scoring, since it allows small teams to punch well above their weight class.

Sales 97

Sales Underperforming Technical Team Systems Review Headcount 97

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 5, 2021

And you and your team won’t waste your time working on bad opportunities. The first question sales leaders and their teams need to answer is: who is our customer? If you stay too high-level, the pain could be misinterpreted by your team and the rest of the organization. No more convincing them to buy. No spray and pray.

Scale 107

Scale Sales Underperforming Technical Team Headcount 107

User Pilot

MAY 11, 2022

You can use product usage data to develop an effective marketing strategy, improve products, retain customers , as well as to accelerate customer adoption. Request a personal demo with the Userpilot team, and see how one tool can provide all the data you need for successful customer segmentation. What is product user segmentation?

SaaS 95

SaaS Underperforming Technical Team Onboarding Churn 95

Chart Mogul

MAY 7, 2020

Onboarding a new member of your sales team is challenging on its own, but especially so when they have to call prospects out of the blue. Providing the right cold calling training can make or break the success of a new team member. Explain their existing sales process and what they learned in the course of developing it.

Sales Hiring 52

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketplace as a Service Headcount 52

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

Of course, just assuming the worst is almost as bad as assuming (and acting as though) everything will be okay, and simply continuing on as normal. Supporting schedules including revenue build, headcount and payroll breakdown, and debt schedules are useful in understanding those drivers. Monitoring and refining.

Forecasting 40

Forecasting Underperforming Technical Team Headcount Scale 40

Valuize Consulting

DECEMBER 13, 2021

As Customer Success as a discipline has grown, it has also developed an accompaniment of misconceptions and myths, generating a lot of confusion about how to do it right and scale successfully. Customer Success Management: Distinguishing Fact From Fiction.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Scale Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 52

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 15, 2021

During one of our BIG RYG Hyper-Workshops on budgeting for Customer Success headcount, Kristen Hayer of The Success League, framed this shift by explaining that as a CS leader, you’re not running a happiness team, you’re running a revenue team. Your team will start to get pushed on the money side of things.

Customer Success 97

Customer Success Benchmarks Scale Underperforming Technical Team 97

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 20, 2019

There’s no shortage of advice for SDRs online , so it’s easy to find nuggets of wisdom to help in your sales career, but unfortunately there’s also a lot of bad advice. At the time I didn’t fully value the SDR experience or the skill set I was developing. The virtue of patience.

Sales Hiring 35

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Headcount 35

Point Nine Land

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting 61

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 61

BetterCloud

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

One exec’s greatest failure: “I was seduced by a build scenario … it turned out to be a very poor decision”. After being “seduced by a build scenario,” Holst-Knudsen says he convinced the company to move ahead with it, which turned out to be a very poor decision. But software development and IT resources are still a cost.

VP of Engineering 45

VP of Engineering Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Engineering 45

OpenView Labs

JUNE 10, 2019

For proof, might I suggest the classic post Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager , which presents a very different vision for the role of product manager than most of us have today). They know the immense value of user input and customer development. Team Alignment. Team Alignment. Table of Contents. Best Practices.

Management 55

Management SaaS Scale Sales Recruiting 55

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 13, 2021

Although Linda started her career in sales, she has spent the past twelve years scaling post-sales teams and moving hyper-growth companies like Zendesk, Slack, and now Gong upmarket into the enterprise realm. So how do you create a strong, enterprise-ready team? Not just support on steroids: How to build a customer success team.

Scale 177

Scale Customer Success Strategy Sales Hiring 177

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team. Yes, Dropbox started off with no traditional sales team. billion in revenue) so it’s safe to say Jeanne and her team have helped do exactly that.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

SaaStr

DECEMBER 3, 2020

In Today’s Episode We Discuss: * How Sam made his way into the world of SaaS with Dropbox and how that led to his leading the sales and success team today @ Loom. What was Sam’s biggest lesson from scaling the sales team at Dropbox? Sam Taylor: And so, I joined as a sales development rep at Salesforce, best move I ever made.

Scale 184

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Sales 184

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 12, 2020

Lars Nilsson, the co-Founder of Sales Source, did this when running worldwide Sales Development for Cloudera. Let’s see how this might look: This is fully automatable: Hey {{first_name}}, I noticed that your headcount recently increased by {{custom_1 = employee increase}}. What do you love and hate about them? Where did they go wrong?

Scale 107

Scale Scaling AI Search AI 107